Rainbow Friendship Bands - made from Popsicle Sticks

These rainbow friendship bands make perfect gifts for kids to share with classmates for Valentines, St Patrick's Day, or any day just to share a little smile. All you need are a few wooden lolly sticks.

We recently made several of these for Minnie's friends & they were such a hit. She loved designing them so much that she has since made more for teachers & family.

To make them we used; large wooden popsicle sticks which can be found in craft stores or on line, some white heart buttons / white felt (bought from The Works) & a selection of coloured sharpie markers. We started by soaking the popsicle sticks in a bowl of boiling water & left them for a couple of hours. A few of the sticks were pliable at this stage, but most of them needed to soak for another hour or so in another batch of hot water.

To mould the sticks into a curved shape try gently & steadily bending the sticks one at a time. If the sticks are too rigid & you can't feel any give in them they'll need a longer soak in the water. Shaping the sticks takes a little practice & patience & works best when you manipulate them slowly before placing each one in a glass for it to set. We left them to dry overnight & when removed from the glass they had transformed into their new rounded shape.

To create our rainbow design we used sharpie markers as they gave us a neat finish & prevented the colours from seeping into each other. Acrylic paint would also work well, but we found the pens gave us an instant result.

You could leave your rainbow friendship band like this, but we felt we needed to add some clouds to the base of our rainbow.

As these were friendship bands we thought instead of using the classic cloud shape for our rainbow clouds we would use heart shaped buttons, & heart shapes cut from white felt. We secured these with a glue gun just to make sure they remained intact when the friendship band was worn.

Then our bands were ready to wear & share!

What a cute way to say:

'Thanks for being a friend' or maybe

'Always follow your rainbow & your dreams' or
'Thanks for the colour you bring to the world'.